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The Pardee RAND Graduate School (PRGS.edu) is the largest public policy Ph.D. program in the nation and the only program based at an independent public policy research organization—the RAND Corporation.

Congress is considering how to update TRICARE, the U.S. Department of Defense health benefits program. In this Perspective, the authors evaluate two existing proposals that incorporate value-based purchasing and describe a hybrid alternative.

Uses a dataset that covers inpatient hospital admissions of a population of commercially insured patients under age 65 from California during 2003-2012, this dissertation makes contributions to the knowledge gap in the literature.

Documents the current range of health plans' chronic care management services, identifies best practices and industry trends, and examines factors in the plans' operating environment that limit their ability to optimize chronic care programs.

This report attempts to help employers understand the structural differences between health plans and the performance dimensions along which plans can differ, as well as to educate employers about available tools to evaluate plan options.

The experiences of Finland, Norway, and Sweden in offering patient choice schemes highlight England's need to carefully monitor the impact of enhanced choice in primary care to ensure that related policies truly enhance access to and improve the quality of care, and not inadvertently benefit those who are more able to exercise choice.

Investigating if the racial/ethnic composition of Medicare Advantage plans reflect the composition of their areas of operation revealed little evidence that health plans are selectively underenrolling blacks, Latinos, or Asians to a substantial degree.

Research based primarily on reports from an individual's surviving relatives often suggests that end-of-life care experiences are particularly poor. However, this examination of reports from patients found that those who died within a year of being surveyed reported slightly better experiences than other enrollees.

Reducing inappropriate and wasteful tests, treatments and procedures has the potential to save billions annually and simultaneously improve the quality and safety of American medicine, writes Art Kellermann.

If consumer-directed health plans grow to account for half of all employer-sponsored insurance in the United States, health costs could drop by $57 billion annually—about 4 percent of all health care spending among the nonelderly.

This RAND Health survey captures key differences between managed and "unmanaged" care as well as differences among managed care arrangements, and it includes six domains predicted to have an impact on access, service utilization, costs, and quality.

More educated, affluent patients were no more likely to be offered a choice than other population groups, but there does appear to be a social gradient in who chose to travel beyond the local area for treatment. If these results were replicated across England, there is at least the potential risk that when local hospitals are failing, patient choice could result in inequitable access to high quality care, rather than enhancing equity as the policy's architects had hoped.

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Researcher Spotlight

Senior Natural Scientist

Bradley Stein is a senior natural scientist at the RAND Corporation and an adjunct associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh. A health services and policy researcher with clinical experience working with children and adults with mental health and substance use disorders,…

Assistant Policy Analyst

Xiaoyu Nie is a doctoral candidate at the Pardee RAND Graduate School and an assistant policy analyst at RAND. Her research interests include health services research and health policy. Her recent work includes assessment of utilization of anesthesia services among patients with gastrointestinal…

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